strawberries

It's hard to post when I don't have a computer. I apologize to my legions of fans :)

We went strawberry picking with Ilya and Mercedes on Saturday! It was a perfect day, sunny and warm, and when we finally found the place (it was a bit off the beaten track) we had a lot of fun. Well, at first we were a little confused, it was just a whole bunch of land with no one around, but we finally found someone and figured it out. The set up was cool, this is the entire field of crops that they grow to sell:


Right now it's mostly strawberries. It doesn't look like much, but we were able to pick almost 30 pounds total! We also tried some of the lettuce and other veggies that she had growing. Here's a close up of the planting system. The white boxes are just styrofoam, I think, and they're all stacked so you can fit a whole bunch of plants in a much smaller space than if they were planted in the ground. Plus it's easier to pick the strawberries this way. And, it's all organic!

After we picked the plants clean, the lady (I think her name was Betty Jean, rather fitting I thought) took us over to see the animals. They had chickens, pigs, donkeys, goats, cows, all sorts of stuff. They also grow a big corn maze every year that's open to the public.

Once we got home, we washed, cut, and froze most of the berries. How luscious do they look??


We're going to make jam with them once we get all of the supplies. Alfred bought pectin online so we're waiting for that to get shipped. In the meantime, I made a pie! It looked much prettier before it was baked and juice leaked out in a few places. It was super delicious though.


Yesterday we just hung out at home. It was cloudy and dreary all day. Saturday was so busy that I needed a day to be kind of lazy, so since the weather wasn't as nice I figured we had a good excuse to sit around. And eat pie, of course!